


all these things i knew

by sandandsalt



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-08 14:32:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3212612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandandsalt/pseuds/sandandsalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are still weeds in the garden, soft and twisted with wind, like one of Her Ladyship’s lace gowns. They grow in green frost-patterns, on the ground beneath the windows, about the back door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all these things i knew

**Author's Note:**

> silly and florid. this is me circling around my brand of "cottage fic" for the thousandth time, with nothing new to offer, but these scenes have been stuck in my head for sometime now, so here we are.

 

Blessed are they who remember  
that what they now have they once longed for.   
— Jean Valentine, _The River at Wolf_

 

 

 

There are still weeds in the garden, soft and twisted with wind, like one of Her Ladyship’s lace gowns. They grow in green frost-patterns, on the ground beneath the windows, about the back door. He hates them as he hates all unruly things, with a military determination, and keeps tally of the intruders swaying gently in their yard. ( _Their_ yard, the novelty of that small phrase delights her still, gets stuck on her tongue. It makes her feel quite foolish, but when such happiness is kept hidden, whom does it hurt?) After tea, he stands by the window and announces his plan of attack, which is that, once it stops raining, he will go out into the yard and pull them all up by the roots. Their triumphant hero, restoring order to their wild cottage moors. He has said as much every other day for the past week, but there have been other small chores, or his back (he had never said, but moved too stiffly out of his chair, paused a moment against the wall) has ached, or the book he’s reading has been particularly good. She fears they are becoming rather undisciplined, perhaps even lazy, but then they've earned it, haven’t they? Yes, she always thinks, peering up over her novel, watching his eyes blink heavily, drowsy nesting about his shoulders, the firelight on his cheek, they have.

  
  
  
  


She has a ring on her finger and a friend in her bed, and expected neither of them, is surprised every morning of her life. The first weeks she woke up wondering where she was. Where was her narrow, familiar room? The slim bed, the organized drawer of letters, of several dark dresses? The sky is farther from her here; their room is lower and the ceiling not so high. And he is there, bear-like, hibernating at her side. She hadn't believed that either, had counted the stripes on his left sleeve as the sun travelled across their window. She has counted them every morning, to make sure that it’s him. To make sure it’s real.

She thinks he sleeps better here, or at least allows himself to sleep longer, though they both wake up as though they have hall-boys and maids to sweep about while Lords and Ladies slumber. He slept so easily their first night – when they had been shy, put out every light, and she had clutched her nightgown close, lay her pounding heart on their bed – it had been second-nature to him. He hadn't been troubled by her weight at his side or the pattern of her breathing. (He had kept her up, not irritated, but his sleeping presence unfamiliar, his breath not-loud but not-quiet in her ear. She hasn't shared a room, nevermind a bed, since she was a housemaid, a girl. She knows his breathing now, times hers to his.) He rests at night with his face turned and just above hers and his feet swimming just a bit farther down, and she watches his heart keep steady in his chest. Decades, and she still can’t bring herself to speak her worry for it, better to save those thoughts for the bookends of dreams, just before, just after. Sometimes she wakes up and thinks her thoughts are the same as when she fell asleep, the continuous, tidal pull of her own small heart.

So she wakes and he is there, and the stripes count seven and his heart drums along. Good. Good, she thinks, resting her head higher on the pillow, and watches light, like some bright, brilliant dust, settle over his brow.

She starts when his eyes open, when he catches her staring. The crinkling of eyes, his smile, surely pulled from his dream, the gentle ghost of his thumb on her cheek, on her lip. She bites her lip and he feels her bite.

Says, “A habit of yours, Mrs. Hughes.” (He could say _Mrs. Carson_ , but that’s not quite right yet, so rarely is. Mrs. Carson’s habits are new and different and waiting to be discovered.)

“A bad one, my mother used to say, but it’s only one,” She is smiling. Is that a habit of hers now, too? “You,” she says, “have at least twenty.”

“Do I?” He says, but laughs. She can feel the day blooming between them, sees them lying here, listing things off one after another – _Stubborn_ , and _Serious_ , and _Infuriating_ – she can hear his laughter. They will stretch, they will rise, there is a day before them and there is much to do – even here, even for the two of them alone – and it will be good. It will be good.

  
  
  
  
  


They leave kindnesses for each other in secret spaces, keep their messages bottled in the corners. Small artefacts, ordinary things to be excavated and exhumed. The vase from Lady Mary that he filled with thistles, presently resting on the table in their bedroom; the woman in the photo-frame that she kept, took from the things he had thought to leave behind, and placed on the fireplace mantle; the photograph he replaced that woman’s face with; the straw doll she has left in a box in the bottom of her drawers; the two glasses of wine at night, waiting expectantly in the corner of their kitchen. They go walking and when they see the Abbey on the horizon, her hand will tighten around his arm. She does smile more. It is a horrible habit, one she fears she won’t rid herself of soon. (One she fears will leave her, soon enough. Seven stripes, the beat of a heart. She holds his arm tight; she holds his arm close.)

  
  
  
  
  


She didn't think this would ever be her life. She didn't expect anything beyond the keys she still reaches for about her hip, the narrow back stairway she still walks up and down in her memory. She never thought to sit at the end of her bed and to roll her eyes at him as she undoes the pins and placings of her hair, arranges it into a braid.

She could never have imagined this room, or waking up in the night and finding him, his eyes in the dark, watching her. Does she breathe? Her heart rattles against her breast and if they are breathing, she doesn't hear it. He opens his mouth, just slightly, but the movement is so childish in its shyness. Do they flush in the darkness? She only feels her heart. Does he watch her as she watches him? Maybe. Maybe not. He doesn't look worried, only timid, a school boy caught out. The sound of their open mouths, of legs uncrossing under the sheets, like opening a window, like drawing the curtain, its slow curve across the floor.  Her fingers pressed, barely, against his chest, steadying, unsteady. A kiss on his forehead, her head bowed against his, his face in her hands, and not a sound in their tidy room. Outside, crickets. Outside, an owl. Outside, looming against the sky, an Abbey. She hears none of it.

  
  
  
  
  


She wakes up before the sun, and he is not there.

It is both unsurprising and alarming, watching her hand stretch gently, lazy with sleep, cat-like, to his side of the bed and to be jolted awake when there’s only air. She sits up immediately. That he might be awake does not unsettle her. That she is awake is habitual. She reminds herself that, even before she slept beside him, she knew they had been winded up to wake in grey-blue darkness, those slight hours before the sky lights into fire. She knew all about him before she ever felt his weight, underneath her and to her side, rest on a mattress. And now she is off-balance without it. Worried, because he ought to be there, and then nervous as that thought takes root, as she realizes where it branches.

She hears humming from another room and scatters the blankets before her knees into mottled, tangled sea foam.

His shadow paces across their doorway and then he is there, smiling (a shared habit, maybe) in a plain shirt and simple trousers, coloured in greys. “Good morning,” He whispers, though there is no one left to wake, and then, “Join me?”

“I’m quite a state,” She finds herself whispering back. “My hair’s hardly proper.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It doesn't matter? Oh dear. Where have you hidden my husband?” A smile. A bitten lip. She stands and wraps herself in her robe while his shadow marches away. She fixes the braid against her skull in a hasty handful of silver pins, half-presentable now, and then places her feet half-way into her shoes, creeps out, her steps like a newborn fawn’s, through the backdoor.

She sees him, but sometimes she sees two of him, overlaid atop each other. The man who sleeps in her bed and Downton’s great butler, she calls them by the same name, her Mr. Carson; her Mr. Carson, crouched in the ferns and unruly grass, with his knees in the earth, pulling weeds with his bare hands. She stands in the doorway and watches him pull and purge and lay his spoils stalk to stalk, root to root, under their window. Her Mr. Carson, with his hands covered in dark earth, pulling weeds before it rains. She is holding her hands close to chest, and thinking of that other girl who still flits between her bones, the farm girl with her legs in the mud. She used to know the earth, where it was good and where it was dry; she knew where things would grow. Elsie Hughes, Elsie Carson, together, in the same motion, slides off her shoes and walks barefoot through the dew. She stands beside him. Her shoes wait patiently at the door.

He is looking up at her and doesn't look away as he moves to his feet. She thinks of all the rainy mornings that have passed over their heads, a hundred days, hundreds of hundred days, war and heartbreak and all the things beyond and in between. She is looking up at him and biting her lip because she knows this man. She knows how his eyes open, how he sits up, steps from his bed, and has known him through hundreds of days of waking. Her Mr. Carson, who rose for purpose, for the dignity of The House, for The Family, for himself – and now, he rises for the garden, or, perhaps, for her. For her.

And there is the waking sun, stretching above them, reaching out and over her shoes, running through their garden. The ground is cold and unfamiliar beneath her feet, but he is not, that look on his face, she has seen it before, seen it a hundred times. She no longer knows the nature of the earth, but, perhaps, she still knows where a few things might grow, and she never would've, never could've anticipated this as a girl, but she has grown too, and she wants this, still, has wanted it for some time, will never stop wanting it, him.

So she holds him, and feels his arms tight around her, and the bones of his wrists about her sides, the way he keeps his hands dangling to not smudge her clothes. Those small things, meaningless meaningful things, they make her want to burst into tears. Damn it all, she thinks. She kisses him gently on the cheek, touches his jaw, to say, I see that. I feel that. I know. His lips whisper something in her hair.

I see that. I feel that. I know. I always have.

Her hands taking his, saying nothing as he protests; his cold hands clasped in hers, brought to her breast; soil on her nightgown; the rings caught in the sun’s morning light. She rises. She kisses him, between their limp, uprooted weeds, in their small garden, on her toes. She kisses him.

The day is spreading out before their feet, over the roots of the garden, his aching back, his steady heart, his hands in hers. It will be good, she thinks. It will be good. It is good.

 

 


End file.
